LESSON PLAN AND IEG FOCUS
Teacher Website (Student View): https://niedermanartclass.weebly.com/
*Note: This website gives students access to my lessons. For each lesson, students see my teacher example, read the requirements and learning objectives of the lesson, see vocabulary terms with definitions and visuals, download the rubric, and look at past student work. I also include helpful video tutorials and articles that can help them with skills that they feel lost with. All lesson plans are downloadable for administrators to look at. This website format would stay the same if I worked in high school settings. I can modify this same format if I worked at a middle school.
IEG Focus: Deeper Critical Analysis During Critiques
Growth Goal Statement: All students will be able to critically evaluate the strengths and areas of growth based on craftsmanship (goal 1) and concept (goal 2).
Personal Growth Goal: Implement Changes to Lesson Plans Based on Student Feedback
At the end of each lesson and after the critique, I gave students the opportunity to identify the strengths and areas of growth for the lesson and how I taught it. Besides using this process to improve my teaching practice, it also gives students a chance to voice their opinions and shape how the lesson would go in the future. By doing this, I was establishing a co-created learning atmosphere and letting students know that they are serving a "teacher" role to me. My lessons summaries below break down key critiques I got from the lesson during first semester and how I implemented that feedback into the lesson second semester.
- Success Criteria: 85% of students across all levels will be able to score at minimum proficient on a more complex art analysis process.
- Baseline (October 2019): During their first project critique, students analyzed the conceptual meaning and craftsmanship strengths/areas of growth for at least one of their classmates’ art projects. They earned a total of thirty points if they were able to offer positive comments and constructive (rather than negative) feedback to their peers. 90% of the students got perfect scores.
- Progress Monitoring: Beginning students will focus solely on written critiques, with the expectation that they write at least one complete sentence. Scaffolded support will involve sentence stems and guided questions answered in complete sentences. Advanced students will have written and oral (partner and large group) critiques. Scaffolded support will involve guided questions answered in one or more complete sentences. For AP students, the goal is to transition them from analyzing/evaluating one piece of art to a full body of concentration work. This will be achieved by having them critique each other's projects monthly on SeeSaw and analyze the concept, strengths, and areas of growth of various professional artists.
- End of Interval: For their final at the end of the semester, students will be able to evaluate craftsmanship strengths and areas of growth on the same images of art. Beginning students critique advanced work, advanced students critique AP work, and AP critiques professional artists' body of work. Their grades will be based on how deep their analysis is, not whether their analysis is correct.
- Differentiated Accommodations: IEP students and special education students with writing challenges will be given the option to do the critique orally with me or a partner. Grading will be based on how deeply the student analyzed the work without me giving frequent guiding/prompting questions.
Personal Growth Goal: Implement Changes to Lesson Plans Based on Student Feedback
At the end of each lesson and after the critique, I gave students the opportunity to identify the strengths and areas of growth for the lesson and how I taught it. Besides using this process to improve my teaching practice, it also gives students a chance to voice their opinions and shape how the lesson would go in the future. By doing this, I was establishing a co-created learning atmosphere and letting students know that they are serving a "teacher" role to me. My lessons summaries below break down key critiques I got from the lesson during first semester and how I implemented that feedback into the lesson second semester.
Lesson Plans
Beginning Drawing/Painting
Lesson 1: Blind Contour Caricature Portraits
- Technical Skills: exaggerated portrait anatomy, blind contour drawing (hand/eye coordination), creating zentangle patterns based on the principles of design
- Conceptual Skills: combining blind contour drawings and caricature drawings (exaggerated facial features) for humor
- History and Culture: comparing and contrasting blind contour drawings with caricature drawings, examining the purpose of humor in portraits
- Learning Benefits: a high success project for students that had strong technical drawing skills and students that were nervous about drawing. It also taught students how to release perfectionistic control and redefine what's considered "pretty art." Finally, it improved students' hand/eye coordination and careful observation of their subjects, which improved their representational drawing skills
- Student Feedback: while students responded positively overall to the project sem. 1, they were curious to see what would happen when more than one portrait was drawn and if they could work with at least one color. These changes were added to second semester. Asking students to think about creating their patterns based on the principles of design was another change I made.
_blind_contour_caricature_lesson.doc | |
File Size: | 8136 kb |
File Type: | doc |
Lesson 2: Your Name, Linear Perspective Drawing
- Technical Skills: drawing letters and basic geometric shapes in one-point and two-point perspective,
- Conceptual Skills: designing their names with creative typographical design that represented their personalities
- History and Culture: discussing real world application of linear perspective in various career fields; discussing how art and math skills are combined in linear perspective drawings
- Learning Benefits: students work with linear perspective and atmospheric depth in a personally relatable way. They also learn the transferrable relevance of linear perspective to a variety of careers.
- Student feedback: students significantly struggled with learning how to draw in two-point perspective, so the lesson was scaffolded halfway through to include a one-point perspective option and a two-point perspective option. Drawing in one-point first made understanding two-point easier, particularly since most students did not have practice with perspective drawing since elementary school.
your_name_linear_perspective.doc.docx | |
File Size: | 33 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Lesson 3: Surreal Portraits
- Technical Skills: portrait drawing (front on), using 2H-6B drawing pencils, creating a value scale, practicing soft-shading
- Conceptual Skills: students practiced surreal portrait drawing based on three prompts. Spirit Animal (easy): students combine their face with the features of an animal and/or its habitat. Random Object (medium): students spliced random objects onto the face, which could either be completely random or have a theme (such as money). Personifying an Emotion (hard): students used abstract or representational symbols on or around the face to convey an emotional experience.
- History and Culture: students learned about the history of the surrealism movement, as well as its most famous artists.
- Learning Benefits: students learned how to draw a portrait with correct symmetrical proportions, as well as sighting and measuring drawing skills. There were also creative problem-solving challenges that slightly worked on abstract thinking.
- Student Feedback: students did not want to take pictures of themselves for the project, preferring to create a generic face with the surreal elements. However, this made it challenging for students to learn how to shade the face. My takeaway was making them take reference pictures and giving them the option to do hard-edged shadows or blended shadows. Students also wanted the option to work with colored pencils. Later in the semester, they felt that working with color would've helped them transition into lesson 4 better.
surreal_portrait_dp_1.doc | |
File Size: | 3476 kb |
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Lesson 4: Notan Animal Painted Portraits
Note: This project was done second semester after we transitioned into remote learning. Students did not have access to paint. They had the option to complete the project using colored pencils (with a focus on complimentary, primary, or secondary color schemes) or regular pencils (focusing on opposite contrasting shapes).
- Technical Skills: drawing symmetrical animal portraits in either a realistic or tribal style, mixing and using acrylic paint
- Conceptual Skills: students learned about different color schemes (primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, and analogous) and working within a limited palette range by choosing one of the color schemes
- History and Culture: students learned about this history and practice of Japanese Notan art
- Learning Benefits: students identified various color schemes and strategically mix light/dark colors based on contrast. Whether they chose a realistic or stylized approach to their animal, they developed a strong understanding of bilateral symmetry and design.
- Student Feedback: students were overall pleased with the lesson and did not suggest any specific areas of growth
Note: This project was done second semester after we transitioned into remote learning. Students did not have access to paint. They had the option to complete the project using colored pencils (with a focus on complimentary, primary, or secondary color schemes) or regular pencils (focusing on opposite contrasting shapes).
notan_animal_portrait_painting.docx | |
File Size: | 295 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Advanced Drawing/Painting
Lesson 1 (First Semester): Surreal Portraits
- Technical Skills: portrait drawing (three-quarter and side view), hand drawing, using 2H-6B drawing pencils, practicing soft-shading and realism shading
- Conceptual Skills: students practiced surreal portrait drawing based on three prompts. Spirit Animal (easy): students combine their face with the features of an animal and/or its habitat. Random Object (medium): students spliced random objects onto the face, which could either be completely random or have a theme (such as money). Personifying an Emotion (hard): students used abstract or representational symbols on or around the face to convey an emotional experience.
- History and Culture: students learned about the history of the surrealism movement, as well as its most famous artists.
- Learning Benefits: students learned how to draw a portrait with complex angles and correct symmetrical proportions. They also worked on drawing hands and the "sighting and measuring" approach for realism. There were also creative problem-solving challenges that slightly worked on abstract thinking.
- Student Feedback: this project was taught at the beginning and the advanced level to see which group had stronger conceptual thinking skills. The advanced group had more conceptual success. However, students requested that they wanted more support on drawing hands. This caused me to scrap teaching this lesson second semester in favor of teaching a lesson that focused solely on hands.
surreal_portrait_dp_2.doc | |
File Size: | 3473 kb |
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Semester 1
Lesson 1 (Second Semester): Name in Sign Language/Shadow Puppet Portraits
- Technical Skills: drawing hands with correct anatomical realism, using 2H-6B drawing pencils, practicing soft-shading and realism shading
- Conceptual Skills: students had the option to either spell out their name/a word in American Sign Language or draw their hands in various shadow puppet poses. They also had the option to come up with their own hand designs.
- History and Culture: history and application of American Sign Language, learning the signed letters for reference pictures, learning how to do shadow puppets
- Learning Benefits: students learned how to draw six hands realistically, which was not something they'd been exposed to previously. They also learned specific realism techniques for shading. At the same time, students had conceptual freedom based on the prompt options and materials (graphite, colored pencil, or pen and ink)
- Student Feedback: This project was very technical and had limited creative freedom. Some students liked this and others didn't. Students wanted more conceptual freedom while still meeting the expectation of drawing hands realistically. They were encouraged to give suggestions for prompts that would make the project more creative. After seeing the "transcend" drawing, students liked the idea of drawing sign language hands of a word that was personally meaningful to them. The composition of the hands could be based on this word. Another suggestion was drawing six hands that told an emotional story.
realistic_hands_lesson.doc | |
File Size: | 882 kb |
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Second Semester
Lesson 2: Portrait Painting
- Technical Skills: portrait drawing (front on, three-quarter, and profile), mixing skin colors with acrylic, underpainting skills
- Conceptual Skills: this project focuses more on the technical skills for time management purposes
- History and Culture: discussing the differences between portrait drawing and portrait painting, discussing how portrait painting was used to document people from the past until photography was invented
- Learning Benefits: students learned how to draw portraits realistically, paint light and dark values using an underpainting, and mixing and glazing primary colors to paint skin.
- Student Feedback: throughout semester 1, students wanted training on how to paint skin tones. I didn't have time to do this last semester, so I created a lesson that just focused on that.
portrait_painting_lesson.doc | |
File Size: | 3750 kb |
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Semester 2
Note: This project was not able to be finished because of the transition to remote learning. Students did not have access to painting materials to finished their project, much to everyone's dismay. Below are the examples of the in-progress work.
Note: This project was not able to be finished because of the transition to remote learning. Students did not have access to painting materials to finished their project, much to everyone's dismay. Below are the examples of the in-progress work.
Lesson 3: Character Design Project
- Technical Skills: gesture drawing, figure drawing using the squares and cylinders approach, using mixed media materials and techniques
- Conceptual Skills: doing artistic research for designing the character's outfit and gesture, journaling about the character's personality and backstory, thinking about how the character's gesture represents his/her/their personality and abilities. Students had the option to design a realistic character or a cartoony character.
- History and Culture: students learned the purpose of character design and concept art in animation and video games.
- Learning Benefits: students learned how to create a character that was relatable and meaningful. They also learned about designing positive and negative space by creating a strong "character silhouette" that made their character look iconic.
- Student Feedback: students loved this project and did not suggest any changes for it. I wonder if there could be a way that I could have students partner up and propose designs for each other as a way to practice commission work.
character_design.doc.docx | |
File Size: | 2082 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Painting Studio/Independent Project
Advanced Drawing/Painting and Painting Studio were combined in the same period. Once students enrolled in Painting Studio, they had the option to follow along my lessons again to improve specific technical skills or create their own work. For the independent project option, the students had the choice to take an experimental approach or a concentration-based approach. Experimental meant that students could explore new materials, focus on strengthening a technical skill, or have the freedom to explore different concepts. Students could also work on larger-scale projects. Concentration meant that students could create a three-piece body of work that explored a specific concept. Students also grade their own projects using a rubric that they co-created. This class gave students the opportunity to plan their work and manage their time independently, preparing them for AP 2-D Art Studio.
AP 2-D Art Studio
In this class, students were required to create a twelve-piece body of work (specifically drawing and painting) that focused on a sustained theme (or concentration) during the entire school year. In addition, students uploaded 1-2 pieces of their work per month onto SeeSaw to be critiques by their peers (strengths and areas of growth). Finally, students were required to do reports that analyzed 2 professional artists body of work. As part of their final exam (sem. 1) and my IEG, students were required to analyze various professional artists' conceptual themes, strengths, and areas of growth. There was significant improvement in their confidence to identify areas of growth for professional artists, since they thought that being a "professional" meant their work was perfect. Upon completing this class, they would receive college credit.
Examples of AP Concentrations (in-progress)
Student 1
Artist's Statement: My concentration investigates the trials of young adults(late teens=> early 20s) and emphasizes the confusing transition by using a surrealistic style, with a warped perception of self/shifted reality. My work captures moments of dubiety going into adulthood, the mixed media materials emphasize a disorienting mood. To execute this concept, I wanted there to be a contrast between highly realistic subjects vs. the surreal elements representing the transition. I refined my skills in technical realism for my portraits to create a stronger contrast with the surrealistic symbols. In my work, I experimented with detailed vs.simplistic surreal elements in the backgrounds. The earlier pieces have the subject swarmed by the surreal elements represent a young adult feeling overwhelmed by the shifting reality. The later pieces are not cluttered with those elements to give the impression that the subject has gained control. In my piece “Ojo” the surreal background overpowers the subject, showing a lack of control. In contrast, my piece “Chisme” has a simple background to emphasize greater control. I want viewers to be reminded of how disorienting the experience of growing up truly is.
Artist's Statement: My concentration investigates the trials of young adults(late teens=> early 20s) and emphasizes the confusing transition by using a surrealistic style, with a warped perception of self/shifted reality. My work captures moments of dubiety going into adulthood, the mixed media materials emphasize a disorienting mood. To execute this concept, I wanted there to be a contrast between highly realistic subjects vs. the surreal elements representing the transition. I refined my skills in technical realism for my portraits to create a stronger contrast with the surrealistic symbols. In my work, I experimented with detailed vs.simplistic surreal elements in the backgrounds. The earlier pieces have the subject swarmed by the surreal elements represent a young adult feeling overwhelmed by the shifting reality. The later pieces are not cluttered with those elements to give the impression that the subject has gained control. In my piece “Ojo” the surreal background overpowers the subject, showing a lack of control. In contrast, my piece “Chisme” has a simple background to emphasize greater control. I want viewers to be reminded of how disorienting the experience of growing up truly is.
Student 2
Artist's Statement: My work this year has used revealing aspects of beauty in our world, which I would love to have a profound impact on in today's society. We live in a society where we take everything for granted, even the beauty our world holds. Many colors and shapes fill our world, and my intention from my work is to remind society of the beautiful world we have. Taken for granted by the day to day life, I expressed the colors more vibrantly to bring the eye of the viewer to my work. Each piece shows the beauty of nature in all situations. I intend to change the minds of the viewers about our world, so that we can take better care of it together.
Artist's Statement: My work this year has used revealing aspects of beauty in our world, which I would love to have a profound impact on in today's society. We live in a society where we take everything for granted, even the beauty our world holds. Many colors and shapes fill our world, and my intention from my work is to remind society of the beautiful world we have. Taken for granted by the day to day life, I expressed the colors more vibrantly to bring the eye of the viewer to my work. Each piece shows the beauty of nature in all situations. I intend to change the minds of the viewers about our world, so that we can take better care of it together.
Student 3
Artist's Statement: My work explores healing in queer relationships, shown by angel and demon characters. Sin and self-love within the limits of social norms plays a role in the life of these relationships. My work’s style parallels stained glass works, deepening the religious undertones in the narrative. Due to few depictions of queer couples in media, I wanted to portray the pain and joy in being queer and in love. Works 1 and 2 introduce two of the figures, at this point, they are just an angel and a demon. 3, 4, and 5 hold more emotion, with 3 showing a damaged halo and hands around his neck and 4 showing the pain of becoming a demon alone, 5 shows the start of the relationship between two of the figures-with one wanting to be killed. The darker tones in 3-5 are juxtaposed with the relationship shown between the figures in work 6. They’re comfortable with each other and want to be together, but there’s a barrier preventing it. 7 and 8 show the emotions in falling, however the blue figure has someone to comfort him, which his partner didn't. Works 9 and 10 show all figures in a loving position by leaning on their counterpart. At the end, all figures can accept themselves and be with who they love.
Artist's Statement: My work explores healing in queer relationships, shown by angel and demon characters. Sin and self-love within the limits of social norms plays a role in the life of these relationships. My work’s style parallels stained glass works, deepening the religious undertones in the narrative. Due to few depictions of queer couples in media, I wanted to portray the pain and joy in being queer and in love. Works 1 and 2 introduce two of the figures, at this point, they are just an angel and a demon. 3, 4, and 5 hold more emotion, with 3 showing a damaged halo and hands around his neck and 4 showing the pain of becoming a demon alone, 5 shows the start of the relationship between two of the figures-with one wanting to be killed. The darker tones in 3-5 are juxtaposed with the relationship shown between the figures in work 6. They’re comfortable with each other and want to be together, but there’s a barrier preventing it. 7 and 8 show the emotions in falling, however the blue figure has someone to comfort him, which his partner didn't. Works 9 and 10 show all figures in a loving position by leaning on their counterpart. At the end, all figures can accept themselves and be with who they love.